Thursday, February 23, 2012

It pains me.
I wrote this chapter yesterday & THOUGHT I had saved it.
When I came looking for my draft today I couldn't find it.

Oh well, gradually, gradually I'll learn my way around this blogger format.
I no longer 'poof' my entry with the delete button.
That was progress!

Yesterday I finished off two quilts that I made after my eye problem.
I ran into all kinds of trouble with my machine quilting.

In 1951 when my mother decided to buy her 3 girls a portable Singer (which I still have) she stayed in the kitchen while the man went over the basics with us in an upstairs room.

The big rule I remember was don't fool around with the tension.
The lesson I took from that was that girls couldn't be mechanical enough to be taught how to control/manage that zone.
That was the man's world zone.

How sad is that?
So for many years I kept hands off unless I was totally desperate and dared enter that no-no dial.
Just think of how many precious hours of experienced I missed that way.
So sad.
So sad that I was taken in by it.

So when I had trouble with tension I kinda unhappily and somewhat helplessly toughed it through.
Afterwards made up my own test assemblage that I would sew a line of stitching with the presser foot I use for machine quilting.
Upper tension over lower tension & spool thread over bobbin thread.
Keep records!
What a concept!

So I quilted up the pattern piece that I painted in Susan Shie's class.

It's about spirals & different ways of getting logarithmic spirals. It's also about constructing the golden rectangle.

It's about patterns in my life!

Then the 3 most recent quilt finishes.

Before quilting & after....

oops.... upside down.. oh well (& oh hell, too late)

In some ways I don't have the same sense of exploration as I had last year, but I am not hard on myself about that. Art development has ebbs & flows.

And EBBS are just as important as FLOWS.

The quilting was difficult because I did many changes of direction, but I am really unhappy with the overall effect.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

In the old days before European contact there were 30-40 thousand people living around Hana. Hana has a good harbor, quite a bit of flatland to grow poi & humans flourished there.

Nowadays Hana has a reputation for being a combination of hippy's and wealthy folk, as a very poshy hotel set up there. It has a wonderful out-posty general store, and getting there affords you many opportunities to buy homemade banana bread & coconuts. Houses tend to be built less to code, putting it mildly, but some are build in the traditional oh-so-Hawaian simple style complete with corrugated roof and much green paint.

George & I drove to Hana yesterday. I drove the dry side first and he the wet side.

The dry side started with Grandma's Cafe. I love these rural mailbox collections. There was one outside of Grandma's This is the classic green paint. This area was settled by Chinese.

So next door to it was Fong's the dry goods store. We learned that there was a Dr. Sun Yat Sen garden down the way so we stopped there. We were greeted there by poinsettias to die for.

I LOVE this schemata on the base of Sun's statue. There was a lot more too along this vein. Here's another. Some of it is quite revealing.

Classic!! I want to google this whole scheme to pass it on to some of my political friends. Sun went to two schools in Hawai'i & had a brother who lived here.

Onward into the part of Maui I think of as being the moors. Our first great view was of the most recent lava flow on Maui-- maybe in the 1600's, but maybe longer ago than that. I'm not sure.

Not many people live out this way. So services, but plenty of peace. The air was completely machine-free. I love the building in the collapsed cinder cone.

The erosion is wonderful to see. This is the lower slopes of Haleakala, the eastern Maui volcano.

George got pretty windblown!

I loved the ribbon road effects.

Not to mention cloud-shadows on water. Oh yum!!

This fetching #14 cow was one of many in this stretch of land. Grass-fed Maui beef is good.

Further along we stopped at an old graveyard. There are several kinds of graves here. We've visited twice. It's a very peaceful place, right at the cliff-edge of the ocean. Charles Lindberg is buried here. George says a perfect place for burial, if you like that sort of thing.

This is a concrete slab with lettering etched in and lava rocks too. The simplicity of it is really nice. People leave loose rocks at the graves too, so there is a feeling of attendance & care here.

Some of the graves were simply covered with rounded rocks.

After lunch we started home on the northwest side.

The road was high & below in a truly Hawaian community poi is being grown in these ponds. I so want to go down there & look, but I so don't want to gawk at other people's lives!

In this arial shot TWO churches stand-- I want to know what the story is there. I'd love to see that graveyard too. There were several communities like this to wonder about.

The 'tulip'trees were in bloom. Lots of orange amongst the green.

We wanted to walk in a bamboo forest. We looked for one, but didn't find one with a trail. There are several kinds of bamboo brought here. This is what I call the spindly bamboo. Some of the stands we saw of bamboo were impassably thick. This shot was done with Sabina's method of 'drive-by-shooting': blurry.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Yesterday George & I were taken to the site of the very first Library on Maui.
It is a very off road, quaint, very functional, 25-cents-a-book kind of place.
I bought a book for $2 and two books@ 25 cents.

But it wasn't the Maui Friends of the Library building that was so spectacular to me, but the road getting there that really caught my attention.

I was seeing a raw, gritty, dusty, and run down part of Maui that most visitors here never see nor want to see. The surrounds of the sugar mill, which is very active and productive, I find fascinating, wistful, and parts of it, sadly forgotten. It raises all the usual questions: what were things used for, why are they here now, and what will become of them???

Where to start?

Well, let's start with the numbers. I photographed quite a few.

This is some kind of harvester. There are two drivers seats on the platform.

This is typical of the sugar mill zone. Dirt on truck with standout red box.

Another red box.

& yet another red box, but without a number.

Then there's the category of vehicles:

Red is a frequent color with this company.

These are discards.

These are the very big haulers with the plant behind. I particularly enjoy the green barn up high!

It seems that golf carts were a good way, once, of getting around.

These are the cut-cane haulers, I think. When I finally go to the Sugar Mill Museum I will learn more about what machinery I saw today.

The buildings....

The sign is red with Maui dust! This is the side of a shed.

An alley as rich in color as in Italy, but oh, such a different ambience.